The Fox News pundits will love this article for once because they'll think it's only about attacking Barack Obama.

It can't be helped.

Yesterday the Iranian Ayatollahs made it clear there's no middle ground in negotiations between Iran and the United States-led coalition to reach a treaty denying Iran the ability to make an atomic bomb. Considering how impactful economic sanctions have been on Iran, this is on the face of it a curiously obstinate position for the Iranian rulers to take.

In a lot of old Westerns there's an phrase attributed to chiefs regarding treaties the United States broke with Native tribes: "White man speak with forked tongue."

Given the recent success of the Islamic State including this week's taking of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, there's a renewed debate generated by the left about the wisdom of the United States invading Iraq in 2003 and by the right about withdrawing all remaining U.S. troops in 2011.

A wide spectrum of political opinion ranging from Patrick Buchanan on the right, Brad Linaweaver from libertarian minarchist quarters, and filmmaker Paul Greengrass on the left have criticized not per se the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and his rape-room sons from power. Saddam Hussein's awful record of human-rights violations and economic banditry made him eminently worthy of being overthrown.

The primary criticism was instead not leaving the Ba'athist Party in power so U.S. forces could have withdrawn from a politically stable Iraq May 1, 2003 when President George W. Bush stood in front of a "Mission Accomplished" sign on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

A war lasting six weeks would have bled the United States—and the Iraqi people—far less than an occupation lasting eight years.

But that's not my point here. As Paul Greengrass's movie Green Zone portrays, the United States was making back-channel promises with the Ba'athist leadership that the U.S. would begin formal diplomatic negotiations with them if they assisted in deposing Saddam Hussein. If anyone deserves being criticized it's not only President George W. Bush (for attacking a country that hadn't attacked the U.S. first) but U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz breaking promises to Ba'athist leadership turning what could have been a brief war into a bloody and totally unnecessary eight-year occupation. The rise of the Islamic State is a direct result of that treachery.

Now we get to Iran and Obama.

Muammar Gaddafi

Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi saw what happened to Saddam Hussein for refusing to reach a deal with the United States, and went the other way. Gaddafi openly allowed inspections so the United States couldn't invade Libya on the pretext that he, also, was amassing weapons of mass destruction; renounced any ties to terrorist groups and paid reparations for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103; and dotted his i's and crossed his t's well enough that the George W. Bush administration took Libya off its list of terrorist states, opened an embassy with full diplomatic hoopla from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even a phone call from President George W. Bush ending with Bush saying, "God bless you."

The United States was still expanding its embassy in Tripoli during the first year of the Obama admninistration.

Then the Obama administration conspired with Gaddafi's enemies allowing him to be deposed, dragged into the streets and killed by a mob on October 20, 2011. Neither Condoleezza Rice nor George W. Bush uttered a word of protest.

The lesson to any other foreign leader was clear: Cooperating with the United States would ultimately not make any difference. Whether you were a defiant Saddam Hussein or a compliant Muammar al-Gaddafi, you were still a dead man.

The United States speaks with a forked tongue.

Now is it any wonder that Iran doesn't think it can negotiate a treaty with the United States and feels its only safety is in getting its own arsenal of atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles?

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